The present invention relates to wireless digital communications, and more particularly to space diversity transmission systems and methods.
Wireless communication systems include a large variety of approaches, such as frequency division multiple access (FDMA), time division multiple access (TDMA), code division multiple access (CDMA), and combinations. FDMA uses separate frequency bands for duplex communication; whereas, TDMA partitions a single frequency band into time slots which as allocated to one or the other end of a communication link. CDMA uses a spread spectrum approach.
Spread spectrum wireless communications utilize a radio frequency bandwidth greater than the minimum bandwidth required for the transmitted data rate, but many users may simultaneously occupy the bandwidth. Each of the users has a pseudo-random code for “spreading” information to encode it and for “despreading” (by correlation) received spread spectrum signals and recovery of information. Such multiple access typically appears under the name of code division multiple access (CDMA). The pseudo-random code may be an orthogonal (Walsh) code, a pseudo-noise (PN) code, a Gold code, or combinations (modulo-2 additions) of such codes. After despreading the received signal at the correct time instant, the user recovers the corresponding information while other users' interfering signals appear noise-like. For example, the interim standard IS-95 for such CDMA communications employs channels of 1.25 MHz bandwidth and a pseudo-random code pulse (chip) interval TC of 0.8138 microsecond with a transmitted symbol (bit) lasting 64 chips. The recent 3GPP wideband CDMA (WCDMA) proposal employs a 3.84 MHz bandwidth and the CDMA code length applied to each information symbol may vary from 4 chips to 256 chips. Indeed, UMTS (universal mobile telecommunications system) approach UTRA (UMTS terrestrial radio access) provides a spread spectrum cellular air interface with both FDD (frequency division duplex) and TDD (time division duplex) modes of operation. UTRA currently employs 10 ms duration frames partitioned into 15 time slots with each time slot consisting of 2560 chips (TC=0.26 microsecond).
The air interface leads to multipath reception, so a RAKE receiver has individual demodulators (fingers) tracking separate paths and combines the finger results to improve signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The combining may use a method such as the maximal ratio combining (MRC) in which the individual detected signals in the fingers are synchronized and weighted according to their signal strengths or SNRs and summed to provide the decoding. That is, a RAKE receiver typically has a number of DLL or TDL code tracking loops together with control circuitry for assigning tracking units to the strongest received paths. Also, an antenna array could be used for directionality by phasing the combined signals from the antennas.
Further, UTRA allows for transmit diversity, both open-loop and closed-loop (receiver feedback). The open-loop transmit diversity includes both time-switched transmit diversity (TSTD) and space-time block-coding-based transmit diversity (STTD). Closed loop techniques provide some significant gain over open-loop transmit diversity techniques by using channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter. For FDD the CSI can be made available at the transmitter via a feedback channel; whereas, for TDD the channel can be directly measured at the transmitter by exploiting the reciprocity (uplink and downlink using the same channel).
The current closed-loop transmit diversity transmits only one data stream via all the transmit antennas, hence achieves the maximum diversity gain. However, for a given modulation scheme, its peak data rate is limited. Another possible transmission scheme is to transmit the same number of data streams as the number of transmit antennas. While achieving maximum peak data rate (termed multiplexing gain), the diversity gain of such scheme is limited by the number of receive antennas, especially when the number of receive antennas is the same as the number of transmit antennas (which is typically the case). For instance, when linear detection is used at the receiver, the diversity gain for each stream is Q-P+1, where Q and P are the number of receive and transmit antennas, respectively. Hence, it is sometimes desirable to use a transmission scheme that combines transmit diversity and data multiplexing.